--FILE--Plateau les spécialistes de l'art au Musée de la culture mondiale de thé dans la ville de YaAn, sud-ouest de la province du Sichuan, Chine, 17 octobre 2012. Frappé par le séisme
--FILE--Tea art specialists perform at the World Tea Culture Museum in YaAn city, southwest Chinas Sichuan province, 17 October 2012. The quake-hit city of YaAn, nestled among mountains on the fringes of the Sichuan Basis, has a long association with the tea trade and even produced the worlds most expensive variety of the commodity last year. The city, located 140 kilometres southwest of the provincial capital Chengdu is surrounded by peaks and has four rivers flowing through the town. It is located almost halfway along National Highway G318 that stretches 5, 476 kilometres from Shanghai, through Lhasa and to the border of Nepal. While the highway is new, it follows a route forged more than 2, 000 years ago. Yaan marks the starting point of the Sichuan to Tibet leg of the ancient Tea Horse Road, a network of mule-caravan paths, along which tea from as far away as Yunnan was carried to Nepal and beyond, in exchange for horses. Yaan is also a synonymous with pandas, and first appeared in historical records as the place where this elusive outlying member of the bear family was first sighted, in Baoxing county. The local Bifengxia Panda Base is a breeding facility that houses several world famous pandas. They include the US-born Hua Mei and Mei Sheng, who were relocated to Bifengxia after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake seriously damaged another breeding centre at the Wolong National Nature Reserve.
